My children were impressed by the toys the voortrekker children used to play with. The girls used to play with hand-made dolls (shown above) and the boys used to take the jaw bones and teeth of animals that had been killed and pretend they were wagons and oxen (shown below).

There was a display up showing us what the men and women wore during that time. My picture is a little fuzzy as the lighting in the basement is not very bright. The picture, however, does give you an idea of the clothes they wore. The ones pictured here would have been their Sunday best – the clothing they would have worn to go to church.

We enjoyed strolling around in the basement and looking at these items. They helped to give us a sense of who the voortrekkers were. My children enjoyed their mini history lesson and came out of the monument asking many questions about the past.

(This post was created as a response to a comment made by Belinda at Busy Mind Thinking on one of my Voortrekker Monument posts. The weekly photo challenge at WordPress encouraged me to complete the post that had been sitting in my draft box.)

These are incredible! And the detail!!! I have to read it again as I wanted to browse through when I received your message. Thank you for sharing history and your family memories with me of adventure. Huge hugs. May I have permission to re-blog this?

The thing I’m most enjoying about this week’s challenge is the view of so many different monuments from all over the world. I love that you are passing the respect for the past on to your children also Colline. Nicely done.

I am enjoying all the monument visiting too Tina. I have seen views of places I never knew existed.
I like sharing what I know of the past with my children. And visiting museums, etc, shows them that knowledge can be learned from not only books.

I enjoyed every bit of this post and the photos. And how you captioned each one of them makes it more than just beautiful photos to look at. It’s one whole storybook. Thank you for sharing this Colline.

How awesome! I learned much soaking up this post. and I like getting to know more about “period pieces” and antiques and so as I looked at the little labels next to some times it was really educational. also, I agree – the penmanship is exquisite!
fun post – and love the photo of the monument and the teacher! 🙂

That photo of me was taken especially to share with my blogger friends 🙂
I appreciate when displays have labels and explanations next to them – it adds to the visit, I think, and you come away from the visit richer in knowledge.

There was no such thing as ‘idle time’ back then, was there, Colline? Constant sewing, carving, making- no TV distractions. A beautiful life in many respects, but not easy. You have to admire their ingenuity and accomplishment. A lovely share- thank you! 🙂

Definitely not. Take the sewing for example: each item of clothing was made by hand with fine stitches. Even their wagons were made by hand. I think that their life back then was a lot healthier than ours because they were so physical.

Every time we are able to visit, we try to show them something of the country they were born in. It is important, I think, that they know. This is something they would not learn at the school they attend.

Ok, so that was mega cool. Seeing things from another country/world is eye opening. I enjoy intricate details on things and found the shaving kit and was just awed. Thank you again for sharing your world with us. I feel like I am there as well.

They were from all over, Colline, some having been in the US for generations, while others came mostly from Europe. Cheap, if not free, land was the lure initially and then the California Gold Rush hit in 1849. People flocked to our West Coast. There were a few other smaller “rushes”, drawing people to Alaska and Nevada, for example. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed and that was it. People left the crowded East Coast cities for the wide open West, much to the despair of the Native peoples.